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The traditional advice of telling your theatrically-minded child to pursue a more practical career is giving way to different and possibly more informed approach. A new generation of parents is determined to support their kids in the Arts in a way that doesn’t destroy their individual journeys, but strengthens them and their career ambitions.

Veteran Broadway producer Ken Davenport works with them on a daily basis. His newest class of investors, he says, is primarily made of parents who are looking to break into show business for their kids. Davenport, whose credits include Spring Awakening, Kinky Boots and more than 20 other shows, considers this an acknowledgement that making it in showbiz, like any other business, can hinge on who you know—given the amount of talent and outsized ambition that exists. Five years ago, he says, not a single investor fit that bill.

London has always been a first-choice safe haven for the world’s wealthy under attack, and just as one group of immigrant investors withdraws—Russians and Chinese, as of late—a new group of immigrants moves in. This time, says London-based real estate consultancy Rokstone, it is the run of the Iranians.

The rare fossils and feathered models in the latest Dinosaurs Among Usexhibit opening today at New York’s American Museum of Natural History are arresting, but the aesthetic appeal of such relics is nothing new to wealthy collectors. That’s a mixed blessing. Museums have a history of spending millions of dollars to outbid one another and secure spectacular skeletons, but now they’re more often coming up against affluent individuals whose deep pockets they can’t match. T. Rex skulls alone are routinely valued over $1 million.

Furthermore, though private enthusiasts who act responsibly are an integral part of the fossil market, in some cases scientific breakthroughs go unstudied and unseen because of unscrupulous actions on the dinosaur black market. Breakthroughs like those seen at the AMNH exhibit are dependent on rigorous science, spanning from a fossil’s discovery to its display, and even wealthy collectors who have the best intentions may be unwittingly doing harm—and could find themselves afoul of the law to boot. Actor Nicolas Cage famously relinquished a rare tyrannosaur skull—which Leonardo DiCaprio also bid for—when the U.S. attorney in Manhattan filed a civil forfeiture complaint to return it to Mongolia.

As Iran once again opens for business—and Westerners dive in for a piece of the action—it’s perhaps wise to remember that Iranian filmmakers have for years quietly and against the odds been making potent and lively films acclaimed by film critics around the world. That’s despite, or perhaps because of, the Iranian government’s continued attempt to muzzle its filmmakers, either through censorship or bare-knuckled brutality. And therein lies a lesson.

Here’s a short list of the better known cases: Internationally-acclaimed director Jafar Panahi has been under house arrest in recent years, banned in 2010 from making films for twenty years, a draconian bit of censorship he brilliantly and cleverly continues to defy. Then, there’s director Asghar Farhadi, who took real risks when he publicly commented about intimidation and the Iranian government during his 2012 Oscar acceptance speech, winning Best Foreign Language Film for A Separation. In October 2015, meanwhile, film director Keywan Karimi received 223 lashes for releasing a film about political graffiti since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, called Writing on the City.

Left-wing politics are making a comeback in the United Kingdom, which is of more than academic interest since the swing of Britain’s political pendulum can foreshadow changes in the U.S. It was the radical 1975 election of Margaret Thatcher as head of the Tory party that predicted Ronald Reagan’s rise to power.

The new leader of Britain’s Labour Party, the hard-left Jeremy ­Corbyn, wants to renationalize the railways; increase the top marginal tax rate to 50% for incomes above 150,000 pounds ($230,000), among other new taxes; and ban nuclear weapons. The British ­media have written Corbyn off as unelectable, but they might be missing the point.

Even if Corbyn loses the general election, his very ­existence pulls the political center hard to the left. It was Labour’s last defeated leader, Ed Miliband, who proposed a “mansion tax” on properties worth more than £2 million, but it was Prime Minister David Cameron’s “conservative” government that, in late 2014, co-opted the policy and increased the stamp tax to 12% for properties above £1.5 million—and sent prime London house prices falling after five consecutive years of ­increases. A serious tax-the-rich ethos is afloat in Britain again.

The Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly recently opened a major retrospective of the Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. One work eerily crawls with twitching porcelain crabs. The Chinese word for crab, he xie, is also a homonym for “harmonious” and much spouted by Communist apparatchiks. Weiwei knows what he’s doing. “There’s not much harmony here among the crustaceans,” notes the Guardian’s critic Adrian Searle. “The word is also used a lot on the Internet in China, as slang for censorship.” The Times of London says, “This is an exhibition that reveals art’s greatest potential.” Booking tickets in advance is a must.

The Royal Academy sure knows how to curate a show. I saw its low-key exhibit of Joseph Cornell, an American textile salesman and artist who lived with his mother and brother in Queens. The recluse never once ventured outside of the U.S., and yet, in his basement, ­custom-built glass-fronted boxes filled with cutout magazine ­images and trinkets, creating vivid grand tours and other stunningly imaginative worlds in miniature.

A hugely valuable lesson sits in those little boxes. Cornell created a fantastic world out of butterfly wings, copper wire, and a medicinal-blue liquid in Pharmacy (1943), a work that foreshadows the British artist Damien Hirst by a half-century. Same thing goes for Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery (1943), a glass box stuffed with cutouts of parrots mounted on branches to create a three-dimensional assemblage of bric-a-brac that paved the way for Robert Rauschenberg. ­Salvador Dali considered Cornell the only true U.S. surrealist, with good reason.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that creativity comes from limitless freedom, but Cornell’s soaring boxes, dreamed up in his Queens basement, remind us how wrong that premise is. The imagination kicks in when the human spirit needs to soar past confining borders and limits, and the show instantly made me recall WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, who once told me he gives his senior executives “corridors of freedom.” The lesson here: Hand your staff tight budgets and clear limits—and then tell them to use their imaginations to soar past those very restrictions.

My new favorite Indian eatery in London is Dishoom above King’s Cross; no reservations allowed for parties under six people. In the insanely long line outside, you are handed glasses of the house chai before getting sent down to the brick-walled bar. Once there, we quaffed Bombay Martinis, the classic tipple deliciously spiced with cardamom and sandalwood. Count on a 90-minute wait for a table. Normally, I wouldn’t tolerate such nonsense, but Dishoom’s superb management somehow makes the delay charming, and the mouth-­watering dal and char-grilled marinated lamb chops were worth the wait. It is also reasonably priced at £139 for three.

Hakkasan, meanwhile, is a Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant found in a cavernous basement on Hanway Place. The cocktails named Rhubarb Margarita and Floating Goddess were sickly sweet, and the so-so dinner of tofu claypot and spicy prawns came in at £228 for three. But one dish was exceptional: roast duck served with ­slivers of black truffle and a sauce made of the finest white-truffle oil.

If none of these eateries excite, then head to my perennial favorites: Great Queen Street (old-English country fare, updated) and Al Hamra (classic Lebanese). Al Hamra’s grilled quail alone will ­reaffirm the joy of being alive.

Anyone who loves portraiture should head directly to the must-see exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, until October 4th, you can take in the stunning and comprehensive show entitled “Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends.” It showcases the seminal works of the great 19th century portrait painter, John Singer Sargent.

On the last page of every issue of Barron’s Pentamagazine, we run a family portrait, in the hope our readers will be inspired to commission a work of their own family. From each work we showcase we try to draw lessons that help our readers understand what distinguishes a pretty but forgettable family portrait from an important work that resonates deeply with the viewer. We have, in a number of issues, published works that run from the silver-spoon world of Tina Barney’s The Daughtersto Mickalene Thomas’s gritty and moving Sandra: She’s A Beauty . But we haven’t neglected some of the great names of the past, either. One of the most fetching and insightful works about wealthy families we ever published was John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.

There’s a maxim in journalism that “good reporters make their own luck.” What that means is, the best reporters, working a story, have a higher preponderance of getting lucky, appearing at the right place and just the right time. The same can be said of Japan’s fine arts photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki, who arrived in Hong Kong six weeks before the British handed the former territory back to China. Read a lively account by Penta Asia’s Abby Schultz on the resulting series of photographs, called Hong Kong Kiss, up for sale at Sotheby’s wide-ranging exhibition on Japanese contemporary photography.

Taking the family to London this summer? There is a once-in-a-lifetime exhibit to see called “Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art” at the British Museum. Even if you are on a short and harried business trip to London, duck out of your meetings for half an hour and treat yourself to a brief visit. It will renew you – and make you want to go to the gym.

I don’t say this lightly. My daughter works in the British Museum’s press office, so I have long given her finger-wagging lectures on how she can’t pitch me on the British Museum’s exhibits – for conflicts-of-interest reasons. But when my wife and I showed up at the museum on a Friday evening, to pick up our daughter after work, she took us through the Defining Beauty exhibit that will be running until July 5th. Not bringing this extraordinary exhibit to the attention of Penta’s readers, due to some purist journalistic ideal, suddenly seemed far the worse crime.

We entered the exhibit’s darkened first room – and my jaw dropped. There were three statutes in the confined space: Straight ahead, crouching, was Aphrodite, the goddess of love, her rounded alabaster buttocks the definition of soft, feminine sensuality, her head turning to glance at me over her right shoulder, with just a few fingers of her right hand emerging over her left shoulder, like she was personally beckoning me to come around to take a peek at her body. If you do, as I did, beware. She is divine and when you circle around to get a frontal look, her dangerously hard stare won’t let you easily forget her exalted state.

Does your child want to study abroad? At the University of Cambridge , 800 years of history mean that things are done a little differently. The university is full of gardens, which are inexplicably forbidden to undergraduates, and libraries, which require permission from on-high to access. Then there are the prescribed peculiarities of high table, a Byzantine ritual when students formally sit down to dinner. To the outsider, the quirks of a British institution of higher learning can appear intimidating. But for an American student wishing to taste life overseas, to engage with a venerable academic institution where things are done very differently than at an American liberal arts college, then Cambridge – or even, dare I say it, Oxford, a hated rival known in Cambridge as ‘The Other Place’ – is a university well worth considering.

I am one such American who has survived the English donning system. Raised in New Jersey, I first attended Saint Andrews University in Scotland, where I picked up an undergraduate degree in medieval history; this spring, I added a Masters in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic studies from Cambridge. Here are my pointers for American students considering going abroad:

If you hold low-cost stock of great Burgundy and Bordeax wines, it pays to know what attracts the interest of Asian wine enthusiasts, who are buying up rare vintages for investment reasons. Our colleagues at Barron’s Penta Asia recently published an interesting article outlining how the latest Sotheby’s wine sales went in Hong Kong. The top seller was a bottle of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti La Tache 1990, which sold for HKD50,000 ($6,500.)

Our take: If you own low-cost stock of Romanee-Conti, consider selling. Such prices won’t be around forever. Eventually some other vintage du jour will grab the interests of Chinese and Russian moguls.

About Penta

Written with Barron’s wit and often contrarian perspective, Penta provides the affluent with advice on how to navigate the world of wealth management, how to make savvy acquisitions ranging from vintage watches to second homes, and how to smartly manage family dynamics.

Richard C. Morais, Penta’s editor, was Forbes magazine’s longest serving foreign correspondent, has won multiple Business Journalist Of The Year Awards, and is the author of two novels: The Hundred-Foot Journey and Buddhaland, Brooklyn. Sonia Talati is Penta’s reporter about town, both online and for the magazine. She previously worked for the Wall Street Journal and various television station affiliates around the country. Sonia has a B.A. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an M.A. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.